Clandestine HUMINT Asset Recruiting - Recruitment

Recruitment

Recruiting typically begins with identifying targets - "spotting". The target may be "developed" over a period of time before the approach is made or it could be made "cold". Alternatively the potential agent may approach the agency. Many intelligence assets were not recruited but were "walk-ins" or "write-ins": people who offered information to foreign intelligence services.

"Spotting" is identifying people who appear to have access to information, or are attractive for some support role. There is research to identify any ties to counterintelligence, and then selection of the most promising candidates and approach method.

Obvious candidates are staff officers under diplomatic cover, or officers under nonofficial contact, have routine contact. Also possible contacts of access agents, existing agents, or through information that suggests they may be compromised.

Surveillance of targets (e.g., military or other establishments, open source or compromised reference documents) sometimes reveals people with potential access to information, but no clear means of approaching them. With this group, a secondary survey is in order. Headquarters may be able to suggest an approach, perhaps through a third country or through resources not known to the field station.

Recruiting people that may have access to the activities of non-state groups will be much harder, since these groups tend to be much more clandestine, and often operate on a cell system composed of relatives and people who have known one another for years. Access agents may be especially important here, and it may be worth the effort to spot potential access agents.

The deliberate spotting process complements more obvious candidates, but candidates who are also more likely to be compromised by counterintelligence, such as walk-ins and write-ins.

According to Suvorov, the Soviet GRU was not always able to collect enough material, principally from open sources, to understand the candidate's motivations and vulnerabilities. It was GRU doctrine, therefore, to use every meeting to continue to elicit this information. Other intelligence authorities also see eliciting information as a continuing process.

That continued meetings both provide substantive intelligence, as well as knowledge about the asset, are not incompatible with security. Agent handlers still observe all the rules of clandestinity while developing the agent relationship. Knowledge of meetings, and indeed knowledge of the existence of the asset, must be on a strict need-to-know basis.